Saturday, 22 September 2012

In the absence of much new from me I'm sure you'd be interested in taking a look at some of the highlights of this weekend's Euromilitaire show held in Folkestone, Kent, England, now in its 27th year. Euromilitaire is the premier show for armour and figure modellers, no doubt about it, and the models on display are usually on another level altogether. However it did seem that the number of competition entries and general attendance were well down this year - perhaps the organisers will blame the sunny weather for today's poor turn-out. Or perhaps the 10 quid (GBP) entry fee has something to do with it!.. Enjoy the pics and apologies for their quality - as usual the main competition hall was particularly dark with the models being displayed well away from the large bay windows in Folkestone's leading exhibition venue over-looking the English Channel. Personal fave was the 32nd scale crash-landed Heinkel He 111 with wounded crew..brilliant work. I'm sure much better pics of these models will be appearing in some magazine or other soon..I'll be putting up more pics over the course of the coming week... You can click on the images to move in close and/or see the full picture !First up, 'Best in Show'

Friday, 21 September 2012

Some progress on the Zvezda Friedrich. While it looked great on the sprues, the parts don't exactly fit together that well, to be expected for a 'snap-together' kit I guess. I particularly didn't like the upper cowl MG inserts and the tail fin has a large trench across the top of the empennage. The charger intake is from the Italeri kit. A little disappointingly the canopy's appearance is spoilt by some great big 'snap-in' lugs - the model can easily be built and stay assembled without glue. Having said that it really convinces as a 72nd scale F variant...

Now going into the paintshop to be finished as "White 12" of III./JG 53 with a yellow cowl and rudder as illustrated at Ander's Profile Paintshop

Sunday, 9 September 2012

Unlike the older previous Airfix Mustang kit, which included
optional propeller parts to allow a P-51D or P-51K kit to be built from the box plus a variety
of underwing stores including bombs or drop tanks, the new-tool is rather
lacking in this respect since all you get in the box is the Hamilton Standard propeller of the
P-51 D version plus one set of drop tanks which lack their distinctive 'seam'. Unfortunately this means that the RAF option (a P-51 K or Mk IVa) featured in the Gift set boxing does not have the 'uncuffed' Aeroproducts propeller nor the distinctive louvered intakes which were fitted to the side of the engine
cowlings on many RAF Mustangs. The aircraft
featured on the decal sheet of the gift boxing is the well known KH774 GA-S
from 112 Squadron. Fortunately Freightdog models have produced a neat little update set which includes a new prop and lower 'louvered' engine cowl..

Here I've made a start on the kit by cutting away the lower cowl - very straightforward since you simply follow the panel lines and the resin insert drops into place. Note that the kit decal sheet provides no serial while the codes are depicted as
grey when they should be white. On the painting instructions the propeller spinner is
shown to be black when it should either be the wartime red or the post war
colour adopted by the unit which was thought to be light blue.